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‘LOT: Travels through a Limestone Landscape in Southwest France’ |
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Friday, 18 July 2008 |
by Helen Martin
reviewed by Ben Lenthall
Moho Books 2008. 488p; 8p colour.
RRP £18.99 Moho Offer price: £12.53
This guidebook is delightfully old-fashioned. Here is no
mere list of gîtes and restaurants and all the usual oftrepeated
brief and bland eulogies to goats cheese and
sunflowers that you can read everywhere. This is a
guidebook to savour; it literally guides you, takes you by
the hand to show you corners and characteristics of this
wonderful region of which you had been totally ignorant
or had barely understood.
It is a book of prose, of opinions, of wonderful
insights. The greatest compliment I can give it is that,
unlike so many guidebooks, it will have just as much value
for those, like me, who have lived in the Lot for years as it
will for the casual first-time traveller. It is of glove-box
proportions (just) but its true place is on the bedside table
with its chapters being digested before or after a trip or simply for pure pleasure.
We learn how the modern département was formed from the old Haut et Bas Quercy, how
the population of 167,000 today compares with more than 300,000 a century ago. Architecture
and food and drink are both explained in detail. There are chapters on local history, with a
separate one on the Resistance and its terrible impact on the region, plus whole chapters on
Cahors and Figeac, one for each pays in turn, and even one on each surrounding département.
The ‘Lot’ guide did appear before in the late 1980s and at the time it was justly compared
with that other classic of the region: Freda White’s ‘Three Rivers of France’. But it has long
been out of print and this fully revised edition is due to the enterprise of Jan Dodd, guidebook
writer and now publisher. Long may it flourish.
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